I remember a moment I said yes to a big opportunity I was very ill-prepared for. I was interning at a production company in eastlake at the time, called B-47 Studios. It was run by some-what of a Guy Feirri lookalike named Michael. It was just before lunch, and I was filing some last papers before my break, when in walked Michael along with a man whose name I learned was Bob. Bob worked at Microsoft, but he was hungry to create something of his own. When Bob first saw me, he spat on my cheek when he waved his arms and yelled, “You’re perfect!”
I was 18, no college degree, and Bob had just proposed to me on the spot that he wants me to be an “On-Camera Journalist” along with three other women set to join the team. It was for a company that would go by the name of Penta Tech, and it was supposed to be a news company that reported on technology developments in the field and culturally. Pretty soon we had a team of four young women, though all older than me and with a legitimate degree in journalism, who worked with Michael and our studio tech to shoot up to five stories per day, some were from on-going series, others were one-offs. All our videos ranged from 1 minute to eight minutes, and each journalist chose, wrote, produced, edited and completed each story on their own. I became a “hard journalist” that reported on developments on AI in the realms of VR and AR while simultaneously going digitally undercover to report on weapons deals being made on social media platforms. I certainly wasn’t very educated in journalism and spent a lot of time cringing at myself among these other grown women. That also happened to be my first time working with a startup, that ultimately crashed and burned in six months due to bankruptcy.
Looking back, this is an experience I would never take back. Its actually one of my favorite stories, and I learned some valuable lessons I’d rather learn as early as I possibly could.